Building a website from scratch – Part Two

Buying the hosting

Your hosting is where the website files will be stored, and is basically a virtual computer, complete with processor, RAM, hard drive, and internet (which it uses to communicate as a website for you soon)

The best, simplest, and most effective option for our purposes, since I will walk you through everything, is Vultr. You can click that word to sign up, and begin this process.

You’ll see this page:

Go ahead and type in your email, and a good password (I recommend lower case, upper case, number at the minimum). When prompted, you DO NOT have to add money to the account. It is a post paid account, so if you add your debit card they do not charge you at all, unless you use their services.

So if you choose the $5 plan, and cancel after an hour, you will only be billed 25 cents.

Once signup is done, (email, password, credit or debit connected) we want to deploy our first server, and then attach the domain name we purchased in step one. So we go to the blue plus sign in the top right corner. Click that, and follow these pictures.

First, choose your location that you would like the website to be served from, I chose New Jersey as I live in Connecticut, New York area:

Scroll down to the next area which is the SERVER TYPE. We won’t be installing Windows, we need to keep costs down, plus, Linux is a much better web server, and I am holding your hand through this so we choose Ubuntu 16.04 from the 32 bit OS list.

From here we continue to scroll, and choose our price. You are just getting started, and can cancel this as soon as you feel like it (however once, destroyed you have to redeploy from scratch).

Here’s you’ll see I have the $5 plan selected.

Then from there, we choose additional features. Backups are 20% (so $1 a month for the $5 plan) but ipv6 is a MUST (and it’s free) you’ll see I have auto backups enabled, and you can choose not to do this, and do your own manual backups if you don’t want to spend the extra $.

You can skip the rest until you see the fields SERVER HOSTNAME AND LABEL. Do not enter a .com here, just a nickname. It matters down the line, so I enter Sean, and that’s it.

Click DEPLOY NOW and congratulations, you have a computer on the internet. All we need to do now is connect the domain we bought in step 1 to the server you just deployed.

Proceed to step 3, configuring the domain to work with the new server.